by John Keahey
This idea of city opposing city was carried into medieval Italy as well, a time when city-states such as Florence battled for supremacy with towns such as Siena during the Renaissance. It was not civil war when one city fought another. It was more like international warfare—the same as when the Germanic tribes invaded Gaul or the Romans landed along England’s southern coast.
Italians first claim allegiance to families, then their neighborhoods, their cities of birth, their province and region and, finally, the “nation”—but only if the national soccer team happens to be in the World Cup. Italian is a word that describes cultural state of mind long before it denotes political boundaries. Sicilians, for example, are Siracusans first, then Sicilians, and last, perhaps, Italians.
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Modern-day Crotone, its nondescript stuccoed buildings spreading up a promontory, sits jutting into an azure sea at the point below where the Gulf of Taranto to the northeast ends and the Ionian Sea once again caresses Italy’s sole. The città vecchia, with much more character than the città nuova, tops the promontory and is dominated by the remains of a crumbling medieval castle dating back to the early 1500s C.E. That castle, or what is left of it, sits where the first Greek acropolis was built shortly after the city was established. Nothing of that original structure remains above ground. The remains of the Greek temple Gissing sought, with its single shattered column, was ten miles to the south.
Ancient writers say Kroton’s city walls ultimately reached twelve miles in length, much greater than the walls of Sybaris, which were only five and a half miles in circumference at the time of that city’s destruction.
Up by the castle and across the narrow street sit medieval houses and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century palazzi, made from the stones pilfered from those crumbling Greek, and, later, Roman temples and walls. It was from beaches south of here, out along the promontory of Capo Colonna, that the Carthaginian general Hannibal set sail after his failed sixteen-year war against the Romans. Those beaches—if early Roman writers can be believed—were left bloody and heaped with the bodies of native Italian mercenaries who had refused to go along with Hannibal in his humiliating retreat to North Africa. Fearing that those mercenaries would someday be hired to fight against him on another battlefield, he took no chances.
One hundred years ago the town of Cotrone ended just a short walk beyond the square outside Gissing’s hotel window. He walked along the northernmost of three town roads that move away from the square, like spokes from a hub, toward the Esaro River. His road, then as now, was the main street into town from the train station. “Bordered on both sides by warehouses of singular appearance,” the road led to a bridge and to the plentiful orange groves along the river’s banks—now replaced by buildings of an ugly industrial quarter. Those warehouses are still there, but instead of storing grain, they house a series of auto-repair shops and car dealerships.
This Esaro, which flows into the Ionian Sea near the town’s center, is a different river from the Esaro that shares with the Crati the valley on the other side of Grand Sila mountain to the north. That was the valley I had traversed en route to the Ionian coastline after I left Cosenza several days earlier.
In Crotone, rock-hard sand hills streaked with gullies and speckled with low-growing green shrubs now, as in Gissing’s day, provide a backdrop to the town’s southwest quarter. But the spit of land between the hills and the beach of Crotone’s tiny southeast bay has filled up over the past century with hotels, apartment houses, and, of course, automobiles.
Near this area, along the road that skirts these beaches and modern buildings, sits a tiny, high-walled cemetery that must have been here for hundreds of years. The entrance marks the spot where the town’s road ended in the late 1890s. Only a narrow trail continued on in those days toward Capo Colonna, Gissing’s unrealized destination, where the single column rises out of the much-abused remains of the twenty-seven-hundred-year-old Greek temple to Hera.
Gissing visited the well-kept cemetery and spent time talking to its aged caretaker, who had planted trees, shrubs, and flowers to maintain a place of beauty. Unfortunately, Gissing does not give us the name of this gentleman, whose story evokes a longing in the reader to know him better. “When I took leave, the kindly fellow gave me a large bunch of flowers, carefully culled, with many regrets that the lateness of the season forbade his offering choicer blossoms. His simple good nature and intelligence greatly won upon me. I like to think of him as still quietly happy amid his garden walls, tending flowers that grow over the dead at Cotrone.”
More than a decade after Gissing, Scottish writer Norman Douglas visited the same cemetery, hoping to talk to the caretaker his compatriot had written about. Alas, Douglas discovered the old man had died: “Dead, like those whose graves he tended; like Gissing himself. [The old man] expired in February 1901—the year of the publication of the Ionian Sea, and they showed me his tomb near the right side of the entrance; a poor little grave, with a wooden cross bearing a number, which will soon be removed to make room for another one.” Sadly, Douglas does not give us the caretaker’s name either.
Today, as Douglas predicted would happen, there is no sign of that caretaker’s niche. I walked through the cemetery, looked to the right of the entrance, and discovered that all the old graves and tombs I saw dated back only to the first decades of the 1900s, principally the 1920s through modern times. No one from 1901 was there. I have heard that it is a tradition in Italian cemeteries to remove bones from older graves, store them in special boxes in musty crypts, and then fill the newly vacated grave sites with the more recently deceased. This must be the case here as the sacred ground is disturbed over and over, generation after generation.
Today, a paved road continues south from the cemetery entrance, running along the beach in front and leading to a point ten miles away where Hera’s column rises out of the boulder-strewn land. To get to Capo Colonna one hundred years ago, Gissing would have had to ride a donkey along a narrow dirt path that extended beyond the cemetery, or take a boat, as most townspeople did, across the choppy bay to the remote point jutting out into the blue Ionian.
He never made it. The wind was too strong for small boats during his first few days at the Concordia. Then sickness took over, and Gissing spent much of his remaining time confined to his tiny room, delirious and under a doctor’s care.
Chapter 15
Pictures on a Wall
When I arrived a little more than one hundred years to the day after Gissing was here, the Concordia had been gone for so long that no one I spoke with had ever heard of it: the taxi driver, the waiter at a restaurant, the man in the newspaper stand near the town’s square. “Non lo so” (I don’t know), they all said.
The taxi driver told me there were two hotels in the old town’s center: the Italia and the Capitol. The Italia was a single-star pensione. Nice, he said. Clean. The Capitol, even while undergoing renovation, was more luxurious, tre stelle. My budget did not include three stars, so he dropped me off in front of the Italia. I started up the stone steps toward the first level, then stopped.
Despite concerns about my budget, money was holding up well. I had stayed in a series of low-cost accommodations on this tightly financed trip. I turned around and walked down into the street, headed toward the duomo (cathedral), and then turned left toward the Capitol. The room there was reasonable: about the same price I would pay in Rome for a two-star, or even my usual one-star pensione. Not bad, I thought. Television. A private bathroom. The irony of this choice was to play itself out the following morning.
* * *
I got up, ate the requisite hard roll and drank two cups of stony black, wonderfully bitter coffee, and set out to see if I could find the location of the old Concordia. I again talked to people on the street. They had not heard of it. I asked at a religious bookstore adjacent to the duomo. Same story. Soon I found myself at the crumbling castle that my guidebook said had been enlarged by a gentleman named Pietro of Toledo. It had
been partially restored, and it housed, on its top rampart, a small museum.
A young boy, about fourteen with black hair framing black eyes set solidly in an olive-colored, angular face, and wearing a crisp white shirt, dark pants, and highly polished shoes, greeted me and politely asked me to sign the guest register. Looking at my signature and hometown, he marveled to a smaller, younger friend sitting nearby that here was a visitor from some place other than Italy. I was the first name in the register that morning. Only a couple of names were on the page for the preceding day.
The small two-room collection had a handful of artifacts unearthed from nearby ancient sites. But the biggest part of the collection was made up of a series of photographs of old Cotrone, mostly taken before 1928 when the town’s name was slightly changed to reflect its Greek, rather than Roman, heritage.
It struck me that I might see the hotel’s name in an old photo. Then, seconds after that thought, there it was: a photograph, printed in brownish sepia tones, of a doorway and the sign ALBERGO CONCORDIA on a wall next to a flight of familiar-looking stone steps. I called the young boy over and asked him where this building was. Near the duomo, he said, just before the main square.
Gissing occupied one of the rooms of the old Albergo Concordia located above the columns in the center of this Calabrian city, known during his visit as Cotrone. The name over the doorway has changed to the Albergo Italia, and the town, in 1928, was renamed Crotone to more closely resemble the ancient Greek name of Kroton. This is where he lay sick, for nearly ten days, treated by Dr. Sculco. Here is where Lenormant, the French archaeologist, stayed a decade before Gissing, and where Norman Douglas, a Scottish writer following Gissing’s Calabrian trail, stayed a little more than a decade after Gissing’s 1897 visit. Photo by John Keahey
He gave me directions, hurriedly sketched on the back of an old paper scrap he scooped up from the floor. I walked down the narrow streets from the old fortress into the town center, past the duomo. I glanced up at the familiar building before me. The Concordia sign that had been painted at the stairwell’s entrance was no longer there, of course. But higher up, bolted to the ancient stone facade, a new sign said ALBERGO ITALIA, the place I had turned my back on the previous day for more luxurious digs at the three-star Capitol!
This time, I completed the walk up the steps and into the lobby. It was silent inside—no clerk in sight—and decorated with soft, pillow-filled couches. The lobby and hallways were laid out just as Gissing described. I looked along the corridor leading to a series of rooms with a view over the square, from where Gissing once had heard the shouts of peasants loudly demonstrating against some injustice. Any one of those rooms—where he spent feverish days and nights, tended to by the literate Dr. Riccardo Sculco—could have been his.
Reading Gissing’s published account of his illness in Cotrone, I got the impression that he had fondly remembered the good doctor, except when Sculco insisted that his patient remain in Cotrone to recover fully rather than head for the loftier heights of Catanzaro where the air was brisk and free of malaria. In his diaries, Gissing even referred to the doctor as “an excellent fellow,” according to the editors’ notes accompanying memoirs of a Gissing acquaintance, published in early 1999. The memoirs (With Gissing in Italy: The Memoirs of Brian Ború Dunne) are the recollections of a young American journalist who knew Gissing first in Siena and later in Rome, before and after the Englishman’s Ionian trip.
Dunne remembers Gissing complaining, just weeks after the Cotrone experience, about the doctor and his methods of treatment. He called Sculco “that fool” for ordering Gissing to eat beefsteak while in a high fever, something the often sick Gissing knew better than to do. Later, Gissing told Dunne that Sculco was “that numbskull,” who, later, when the patient most needed to regain strength, then refused Gissing any food: “As Gissing, thanks to nature, climbed out of the fever and began to ascend the ladder of health, the doctor exclaimed with a magnificent gesture: ‘No food, Signor,’” Dunne reports.
From my vantage point in the Italia/Concordia hallway, I could only imagine such conversations. I looked behind me, back toward the far wall of the pleasant hotel lobby. On it hung a glass-framed page from a local newspaper, describing how in recent times the Italia took over the space once occupied by the historic Concordia—where the “British poet” Gissing once recovered from a serious illness; where the French writer Lenormant, whose journey Gissing was following, had stayed a decade before the Englishman; and where a Scottish writer, Douglas, had overnighted in the early 1900s while following a portion of Gissing’s trail.
“The shade of George Gissing haunts these chambers and passages,” writes Douglas of the Concordia, in his seminal work on southern Italy, Old Calabria, first published in 1915. Gissing had been disturbed by the squalor of the place and the bad food. Roughly fifteen years later, Douglas found a much-changed place: “The food is good and varied, the charges moderate; the place is spotlessly clean in every part.… ‘One cannot live without cleanliness,’ as the housemaid, assiduously scrubbing, remarked to me.”
All the people from Gissing’s Cotrone, except for Dr. Sculco, were dead when Douglas arrived: the mayor whose written permission Gissing sought to allow him to visit the orange groves along the Esaro River; the housemaid who would occasionally look in on him; the “domestic serf with dark and flashing eyes,” and the hostess of 1897, “the stout, slatternly, sleepy woman who seemed surprised at my [Gissing’s] demand for food, but at length complied with it.”
Douglas spoke with the good doctor, who remembered his patient. “I remember him quite well; the young English poet who was quite ill here. I prescribed for him. Yes-yes! He wore his hair long,” Douglas quoted Dr. Sculco, who had been only four years older than Gissing. The doctor was unwilling to say more about his long-haired charge. Douglas surmised that Sculco was following his oath never to reveal anything about patients, alive or dead.
* * *
Now here I was, several decades after Dr. Sculco and Douglas each had gone to their rest: Sculco, who died in 1931 at age seventy-six, likely buried in the city cemetery Gissing once visited; and Douglas, who, a suicide in 1952 at age eighty-three, went to his grave on Capri, off the coast of Naples. I stood in the Italia/Concordia one hundred years and approximately three months after Gissing paced this very hallway—one hundred ten years after François Lenormant passed along the street outside on donkey-back and stayed here while researching his masterwork La Grande-Grèce: Paysages et Histoire, the definitive late-nineteenth-century work study of Greek archaeological sites in southern Italy, and eighty-some years after Norman Douglas came via train to follow his fellow Brit’s footsteps and write his own book about this region of southern Italy—a travel classic equal to Gissing’s By the Ionian Sea.
At this moment I realized that my journey was part of a continuing trek connected to three people, much better read and steeped in the classics than I, but who shared my passion for Italy’s South and for its colonial Greek heritage. The native Italic peoples, the Greeks, the Romans, Hannibal, the Saracens, the Normans, the Spanish, and other conquerors had laid out the geographic road map that we four, sharing this spot of floor in an old hotel, followed, each in our own era and with our unique perspective.
Now if I could just get to Capo Colonna and see what Gissing, gazing longingly across the bay at, failed to see up close because of growing illness: the remaining Doric column of a temple dedicated to Hera. The writer’s caretaker, Dr. Sculco, had told his patient how he, as a schoolboy, would walk around and around the column near his parents’ summer home, reciting out loud portions of classic literature he was memorizing.
Chapter 16
Bunkers, a Church with No Floor, a Lonely Column
The cylindrical concrete structure—a bleak, lichen-covered sentinel rooted in place for decades—greeted me as I entered Capo Colonna, the grounds just ten miles south of Crotone that hold Hera’s column. I had seen, along the mountain road days earlier between
Paola and Cosenza, an identical small building, also with its slotted windows wider inside than out, in a manner designed to discourage bullets and grenades from finding their way to the interior.
This mottled gray German bunker looked out from its perch over Crotone’s tiny harbor, still waiting for an invasion that never came. Instead of pouring into Italy from southern Italy’s Ionian coast, the Allies in 1943 invaded halfway up the peninsula—first the British at Reggio, then Americans and British at Salerno, then Anzio, both along the Tyrrhenian Sea. Today the machine-gun portals of this tiny bunker, barely big enough for two men, look across the small bay of Crotone to where joggers and dog-walkers meander.
It is always chilling to see these rounded bunkers. The first I had ever seen were in southern Sicily during a trip in 1986. I had climbed up through a farmer’s field to stand on the dome, laughing and joking with a friend, until it occurred to me, looking across a small valley at similar bunkers on the other side, that from these portals blazed machine-gun fire that cut down American and British troops who came not as conquerors, but as liberators.
This bunker’s open entrance, fixed on the land side of the harbor, looks in the direction of Hera’s column, which rises out of the point of the cape (Capo Colonna), just a few feet from the sea.
I turned back and looked across the choppy water at the old town, today just a shimmer in the distance. I could barely make out the castle rampart where Gissing, and I, had stood a century apart. This day was frightfully, unseasonably, cold and windy, perhaps about the same as it was when he was here in late 1897. I wouldn’t want to be in a boat threading my way through the raucous whitecaps. The road from the town, while narrow, was gentle and undulating. Arriving by automobile is much preferable in weather like this.